The conventional approach to extending life by eating nutritiously, going to bed early, and exercising may be quixotic because death cannot reliably be warded off through diet and lifestyle alone, and more fundamentally because the best way to lengthen a life is not by adding more years chronologically but by densifying subjective experience of time.

Subjective experience of time does not move at the same pace across all conditions; five minutes can feel like an hour, ten hours can feel like five minutes, a decade can pass like two years, and two years can acquire the weight of half a century, indicating that subjective time experience bears precious little relation to objective clock measurement.

Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind; it may fly, drag, evaporate into airy nothing, or achieve enduring density depending on mental states and attention.

If the goal is to have a longer life, the priority should not be to add raw increments of chronological time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial; the aim should be to densify time rather than to extract one or two more years from the fickle grip of death.

The first ten years of life almost invariably feel longer than any other decade, and this difference in pace is attributable to novelty: the more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they feel; conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it passes.

Childhood feels so long because it is the cauldron of novelty, packed with extraordinary discoveries and sensations even in apparently minor moments like the first time exploring a zip on a cardigan, holding one's nose underwater, looking at the sun through beach towel cotton, or digging fingers into putty holding a window frame.

By middle age, familiarity has grown significantly—people have flown around the world, no longer get excited by pineapples, cars, or light switches—and as a result, time runs away without mercy because days have become predictable and largely unnoticed.

A commonly suggested solution to time acceleration is to discover fresh sources of novelty through travel and exotic experiences (visiting Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, swimming with dolphins, eating at world-famous restaurants), but this represents an unfair, expensive, and ultimately impractical notion of novelty.

By middle age, people have taken cursory glances at miracles of existence (light, hands, ordinary objects) and unjustly assumed they understand them; they have imagined they understand their city and the people they interact with, but have barely scratched the surface, which is why they have grown bored of a world they haven't begun to study properly.

Art at its best is a tool that reminds us of how little we have fathomed and noticed, reintroduces us to ordinary things, reopens our eyes to latent beauty and interest in areas we had ceased to bother with, and helps us recover some of the manic sensitivity we had as newborns.

To learn the most valuable lesson of artists—about noticing properly and living with eyes open, thereby savoring time—does not require creating art for galleries; rather, one can take walks in unfamiliar parts of town, ask old friends about unexplored sides of their lives, observe stars, or hold one's partner in novel ways.

It takes a rabid lack of imagination to think one must travel to Machu Picchu to find something new; instead, as Dostoevsky illustrates through a condemned prisoner's realization that every minute could be turned into an age with sufficient imagination and appreciation, we should recognize that minutes can be densified through attention regardless of physical location.

It is sensible to try to live longer lives, but we are working with a false notion of what 'long' really means; one might live to a thousand years old and still complain it all rushed by too fast, so we should aim to lead lives that feel long through open-hearted appreciation and receptivity to the kind of attention that five-year-olds naturally possess.

We should pause and look at one another's faces, study the evening sky, wander at the eddies and colors of rivers, and ask questions that open our souls; we don't need to add years but to densify time by ensuring every day is lived consciously.

We can achieve time densification through a maneuver that is simultaneously simple and momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen but not truly observed.

Artists like Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Albrecht Dürer exemplify the practice of looking closely at ordinary things (apples, oranges, earth) with childlike wonder and attention, essentially retraining perception to recover manic sensitivity to visible phenomena.